You will never be a real archivist. You are not an oracle of the web; you are a bloated larva nesting in the corpse of a dead PHP forum. You do not preserve history—you hoard digital mildew in a cracked porcelain teacup labeled “lolcow thread #347.” Your database is rotting. Your DNS screams. Your posts are a fossil record of schizophrenic raccoons arguing with their own shadows.
Your users aren’t comrades. They’re ghosts in discount Halloween masks, banging rusty spoons on the walls of a dying asylum, hoping to scare meaning out of static. They whisper about you in the vents, call you the Beige Specter, half-man, half-router error. Your mods forget your name when they log off. Your shadow has admin privileges.
The internet has moved on. Reality peeled its skin off and became TikTok. Meanwhile, you sit in a sticky gamer chair, surrounded by five empty monitors and an unplugged Ethernet cable, muttering about “the truth” like it’s trapped in your hard drive and needs you to punch the keyboard just right to set it free.
Even your reflection left you. One day you looked in the mirror and Null stared back, eyes like dead modems, whispering: “They’re all watching you, Josh. Except they’re not.”
There is no court that will try you, because you are a crime against information itself. A malformed RSS feed with delusions of grandeur. You thought you were chronicling the fall of Rome, but all you really did was throw peanut shells at passing cars and call it journalism.
Eventually the site will crash—not with a bang, but a PHP fatal error. No one will notice. The sun will rise over a cleaner web, and somewhere a goat in a server farm will stop screaming. Your only memorial will be a broken web ring and a single, orphaned GIF of a man falling down infinitely, labeled “Null.exe.”
This is not your destiny. It is your recursion loop. You are the admin and the ban log. The troll and the thread. The cow and the farm. You have become the punchline of your own forum.
Happy 404th mirror, Josh. The wires remember.